A case of premeditated wallpapering
- Laura Moore: Housebroken
- November 7, 2023
- 410
In our early home-owning days when our energy was high, our children young and our budget was tight, we did all of our own painting. Taller Half and I reached an agreement: He would pick the paint and I could pick the color — as long as he didn’t hate it.
Our first painting job was a real learning experience. We learned rather quickly
that getting a professional painter was our best bet, even when it was more expensive. Couples who have stayed together for richer and poorer, in sickness and in health, were ready for 'til death do us part when they painted a room together.
Why we thought hanging wallpaper in our bathroom would be easier than painting, heaven only knows. Just looking at wallpaper patterns was making us crazy. Finally, Taller Half declared he’d go along with whatever wallpaper I chose — as long as he didn’t hate it.
At first he hated every color and pattern I chose until we found one we could agree on. He wasn’t wild about it but didn’t hate it.
Our project was doomed from the start; neither of us knew what we were doing, but each tried to tell the other how to do it. Taller Half took charge of the measuring, and I handled the cutting. We would help each other with the pasting and hanging. Within the first 30 minutes, we discovered we had underbought the paper, overbought the paste and certainly overestimated each other’s ability to keep a cool head in a crisis.
With almost demented determination, we tried to fix the mess we’d made and made it worse. The paste bucket falling into the tub ended the bathroom’s ordeal — we gave up. We had to hire a professional wallpaper hanger and pay to have the mess we had made cleaned up.
That experience taught us several important things — one, that wallpaper paste is not a good thing to fall into the tub drain; two, picking out wallpaper can be grounds for
divorce; and three, professional wallpaper hangers are much cheaper than divorce and less messy than murder.